


once and true

by MathildaHilda



Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Past Character Death, Post-Game, bc Mary breaks my heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 16:37:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17471123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: Mary Linton doesn’t remarry until she’s almost too old to have children, but she does marry again, eventually, and there's a child born at the end of July the following year.***Mary Linton's life, post-rdr2





	once and true

**Author's Note:**

> It's short and bittersweet, but I just HAD to write something for Mary!

Mary Linton doesn’t remarry until she’s almost too old to have children, but she does marry again, eventually, and there's a child born at the end of July the following year.  It’s a girl, a daughter, something she's always hoped for, but a part of her still wishes for a boy because then, maybe, she'd have named him Arthur.  
  
But Mary Linton, or Mary Gillis-Johns come the second time, only carries a daughter in her heart and soul and a boy in her dreams and inner mind, because she'd had him, just for a moment, and he has always been so real that she's grown used to crying herself awake in the night before her daughter cries too, because, even after all that time, she still dreams of something that had been hopeless from the start.

He never comes with her to the grave on the mountain, not because he feels any form of resentment toward the man she carries next to him in her heart, but because Arthur is her peace. He is her life, but he will never be her peace and war and he still loves her for it.

  
  
Mary Gillis-Johns meets Jack Marston but doesn't know it at first, because all she sees is the ghost of the young boy she saw in the woods when she kissed Arthur that first time and the curious child had climbed to the top of the nearest tree once Arthur had heard him mimic a retch and seen him owling them like animals on a circus and threatened to geld him if he told.  
  
She meets Jack Marston while she holds her daughter's hand and there’s a bow in her girl’s hair, her eyes so much older and no less kind, smiles and offers to buy him a drink, because he looks so sad and all the outlaws she’s known always grew happy on the account of drink. But he declines her politely, bows his head and marches on and his father's hat seems to weigh him down like the crown of an outlawed king.

Perhaps he is, she thinks for a moment. He is the outlawed king of a kingdom long since burnt to the ground and forgotten in all but the stories and the dust in the air. In her journal, uncovered by her daughter so many years later, she remarks how Jack Marston, darling little Jackie, had become the very shadows his father had tried to turn away from the door.

(She reads an obituary and an article, clipped together in the newspaper with only days in between, and she mourns for the woman she’d once known, and almost laughs over the man dead in the water, before she collects herself and sends word to Beecher’s Hope.

There’s never a reply.)  
  
  
Mary Gillis-Johns is widowed again on the eve of spring and holds her husband's hand until the end, and a part of her sees the scarred hand of a boy she once loved and she doesn't know if she cries for her husband or the one that could've been or maybe both, but she cries nonetheless. She kisses his hand and holds it there, close to her lips, until he’s grown cold to the touch and blue to the sight, and doesn’t go outside until the bluebirds sing in the trees.  
  
(And when she does, she brings her daughter to the grave and plants a new flower; the kind Arthur'd given her the second time they met before he learnt how it was a weed, and when he was small and flustered and his eyes were bluer than the sky. She tells her daughter about the outlaws and what could've been, and she does cry again when the elks and coyotes prowl closer, sniffs the air and leaves them be.  
  
Not because she's afraid. No, Mary Gillis was never really afraid of much.  
  
No, it's because she knows, even just a little, that what they once had was true.)

She lives alone with only a few servants by the end and she's seen Little Jack Marston more than once, but there's been another War and he's not been seen since, and so she doesn’t hope too much that she'll see his shadows again.

He’d told her a few stories, stick figures drawn on cotton dreams, and she travels to Beecher’s Hope just because she can and watches, from afar, how nature’s always been a part of the Marston life. There are three crosses on the hill and the house is gone and empty and she places a daisy on every grave, because even if she didn’t love them, there was something.

(She carves his name on wood with Mister Dawson’s knife and drives it into the ground herself, leaving just a reminder of those that used to be.

Jack Marston is not there, but he rests there all the same.)  
 

Her daughter comes, occasionally, and tells the stories she's seen, heard and read and tells them in such a way that Mary can see it all so clearly that she can touch it if she just reaches, and she does reach but the stories are now nothing more than smoke.  
  
But she  _can_ touch it, even if it’s just a fragment, two years before she dies when her daughter comes home with a child in her arms and a husband by her side and he’s so small and blue eyed, dimpled cheeks and he laughs just like he used to; pure and untouched and so without sin.

She loved him from the moment her daughter wrote his name in the letters she sent from New York and she loves him even more when she sees him, because he doesn't look like him and it somehow makes it easier to breathe.

   
(Her daughter’s husband finds a list of names of those long dead and without family and brings her to where they buried him and so many others and keeps the secrets of his passing to himself, and they don’t tell Mary, because she’s made her peace one final time and the boy was anything but.)

   
Mary Gillis-Johns dies in February in a place where the air is cold and thin and there's still too much snow outside to dig a grave that's not just snow and ice. So, they take her back to where she grew up, further South and with more wildflowers and horses about and where the sun can still shine through the too-thick clouds.

Her daughter thinks, but doesn't, about burying her up the mountain, but the spot has always only ever been her mother's place of peace, so she leaves her mother beside her father with the flowers that used to grow up there and that weed in between her fingers, and prays for her and Uncle Jamie and even Granddaddy and she prays silently, without the Reverend's knowledge, to the outlaw upside a mountain, buried under an open sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't seen anything canon written about Jack Marston's life post-rdr, so this is my own little spin on him, which is also why I made his story a little ambiguous.


End file.
